News & Views

Cannes Lions / Creative Effectiveness Winners

Volvo Trucks' Live Test Series has won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness – designed to reward work 'that has produced a measurable and proven impact on a client's business'.

Wendy Clark from The Coca-Cola Company described the remit the jury set themselves as 'to find the highest intersection of creativity and effectiveness. Too often in our industry it is easier to find the lowest common demonimator... Fundamentally, we believe in the power of art and commerce. We wanted to find work which could celebrate art and commerce effectively.'

When it came time to choose the Grand Prix, Live Test Series, via Forsman & Bodenfors, was chosen as a campaign which the creatives wanted to celebrate as much as the planners and was 'an otherwise functional story told artfully'.

'It wasn't just that they had measurements, but that they had measurements linked back to the objectives that they explicitly stated in the case. The best results were those that not only met the objectives but were way above them. That was a huge differentiator.'

When the time came to separate the good from the great and the not-so great, Suresh Nair, Grey's global chief strategy officer and jury member told us, 'A lot of the cases that didn't make it to the shortlist had an amazing idea but they didn't really attach the results to the idea. A lot of papers found it hard to do that.'

'One of our biggest frustrations was that many of them had softer results,' added Wendy Clark. 'We needed to see quantified movement in the business. We needed to see the objective and see it quantifiably met.'

Out of 160 entries, only 17 campaigns won an award, with the two Gold Lions being scooped by John Lewis for its The Bear and the Hare campaign, via adam&eveDDB, and Honey Maid's This is Wholesome.

To find out the thinking behind the campaigns, check out our Volvo and John Lewis Insight & Strategy interviews.